Alcaeus (Alkaios) of Mitylene (ca. 620 BC-6th century BC), Greek lyric poet, was an older contemporary and an alleged lover of Sappho, with whom he exchanged poems. He was of the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where his life was entangled with its political disputes and internal feuds. He sided with his class against the upstart "tyrants" who set themselves up in Mytilene as the voice of the people. He was in consequence obliged to spend a considerable time in exile. He is said to have become reconciled to Pittacus, the ruler set up by the populist party, and to have returned eventually to Lesbos. The date of his death is unknown. Centuries: 8th century BCE - 7th century BCE - 6th century BCE Decades: 670s BCE 660s BCE 650s BCE 640s BCE 630s BCE - 620s BCE - 610s BCE 600s BCE 590s BCE 580s BCE 570s BCE Events and trends 627 BCE - Death of Assurbanipal, king of Assyria; he is succeeded by Assur-etel... (7th century BC - 6th century BCE - 5th century BCE - other centuries) (600s BCE - 590s BCE - 580s BCE - 570s BCE - 560s BCE - 550s BCE - 540s BCE - 530s BCE - 520s BCE - 510s BCE - 500s BCE - other decades) (2nd millennium BCE - 1st millennium BCE - 1st millennium) The 5th and 6th centuries BCE were... Lyric can have a number of meanings. ... Ancient Greek bust of Sappho the Eresian. ... This city is not ot be confused with a village in the island of Samos named Mytilinii Mytilene (Μυτιλήνη in Greek) is the capital city of Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. ... Lesbos (Greek: Λέσβος - Lésvos; see also List of traditional Greek place names) is an island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea. ... A tyrant (from Greek τύραννος týrannos) is a usurper of rightful power, possessing absolute power and ruling by tyranny. ... Pittacus was the son of Hyrradius, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. ...

When his poems were edited in Hellenistic Alexandria, they filled ten scrolls; the poetry of Alcaeus has survived only in quotations: "Fighting men are the city's fortress" and the like, so judging him, rather than his high reputation in antiquity, is like judging Ben Jonson through Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The subjects of his poems, which were composed in the Aeolic Greek dialect, were of various kinds: hymns to the gods; martial or political comment, sometimes quite personal; and lastly love-songs and drinking-songs, the kind of poetry that would be read aloud at a symposium. Alexandrian scholars agreed that Alcaeus was the second greatest lyric poet among the canonic nine. The considerable number of fragments extant (see link), and the imitations of Alcaeus in Latin by Horace, who regarded Alcaeus as his great model, help us to form a fair idea of the character of his poems. The term Hellenistic (established by the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen) in the history of the ancient world is used to refer to the shift from a culture dominated by ethnic Greeks, however scattered geographically, to a culture dominated by Greek-speakers of whatever ethnicity, and from the political dominance... Antiquity and modernity stand cheek-by-jowl in Egypts chief Mediterranean seaport Located on the Mediterranean Sea coast, Alexandria (in Arabic, الإسكندرية, transliterated al-ʼIskandariyyah) is the chief seaport in Egypt, and that countrys second largest city, and the capital of the Al Iskandariyah governate. ... It has been suggested that Greco-Roman be merged into this article or section. ... Benjamin Jonson (June 11, 1572 – August 6, 1637) was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. ... Bartletts Familiar Quotations, often simply called Bartletts, is an American reference work that is the longest-lived and most widely distributed collection of quotations. ... Aeolic Greek is a linguistic term used to describe a set of rather archaic Greek sub-dialects, spoken mainly in Boeotia (a region in Central Greece), in Lesbos (an island close to Asia Minor) and in other Greek colonies. ... Originally, the term symposium referred to a drinking party; the Greek verb sympotein means to drink together. The term has since come to refer to any academic conference, irrespective of drinking. ... The nine lyric poets were a canon of archaic Greek composers esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study. ... Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus, (December 8, 65 BC - November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading lyric poet in Latin, the son of a freedman, but himself born free. ...

External link

• A. M. Miller, Greek Lyric: Alcaeus, many fragments.